Not even a day without!
It isn’t good,
now black poems pile in every gland.

It isn’t all bad.

This morning I leapt clean from the blocks,
pushing up into lulled woodland.
Low fog was with me like a tailwind.
Even the marsupials seemed groggy,
letting me metres closer than usual
before the bolt.
Losing sight
of shore quickly through drenched bracken whelming
taller than thought; occasional gumshed
clearings to catch breath in, lowlit
with heath, banksias, quadruped acacias,
all busy uploading winter blooms.
Lungs gasped like landed fish.
My calves burnt. But I was busy
beating out a way, a non-way,
fumbling its breadcrumbs childishly back
to half known tracks – but not quickly.
Untold hours away from myself
were gold.

Lagging back to the shack
still brimming with animal fatigue,
I forgot to take lunch seriously –
scoffed! – letting blinkered
thoughts get a zealot look in.

But a scarlet robin bobbed up
just in time to enthral me:
insatiable bird narcissism
craves every drop of crimson, every jet
black pixel the car’s side mirrors
kept dishing up – and then some;
the pull looked worse than heroin.

Then when you consider the sugar-fix
sought daylong by a needling
eastern spinebill … (But you
wouldn’t. What sober person would?)

Everyone was carrying but me.
And hadn’t I already lasted long enough?
And what cost continuing this see-saw without?

A precious deafness had dissolved
with the morning fog; the pistons
more than audible now, insistent
as the blanks always there between stanzas
spent leaving myself and landing on things.

And then the phone rang and I forgot
that to answer a phone is to look at a clock;
and to look at a clock was to know,
mid-June, if I didn’t leave soon
I’d miss my dealer’s daily window.

The addicted mind is a mob:
Chinese whispers at compound interest
gain sociopathic sway. For me,
the forum always screams loudest around 1600.